


Break/Through

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Declarations Of Love, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Injury Recovery, Medical Trauma, Memory Related, Partners to Lovers, Physical Therapy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-23 00:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11391561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: She ends the day with the best of intentions.





	Break/Through

**Author's Note:**

> A tag for Kill Shot (4 x 09)

She ends the day with the best of intentions. She leaves Burke’s office with a fist full of literature on her options and swallows down her frustration that she can’t just do what she’s been doing only more. Harder. Longer.  Apparently, there’s no accelerated course through the damage a sniper’s bullet left behind. No quick and dirty way to clean out the scar tissue left by the piss-poor coping mechanisms she’s used since she was nineteen. 

So she swallows it down. She works the anger into long strides. Into goals that drag her focus away from the blare of horns and the squeal of tires. From light glinting off windshield glass and a hundred other things that want to drag her back into the endless loop. 

Sirens

The flatline shrill of the monitor

Lanie's voice choked with sobs

 _You do_ not _die on me_

It’s a rallying cry, suddenly. The miserable, terrified command unfolds into something solid. A handhold and she pulls herself forward. Through the moment. 

She works it into the rhythm of her steps. Anger. Fear. Whatever else it is. She uses it. Makes  bets with herself. That she can pick up the pace to catch the tail end of the light at the intersection so she doesn’t have to idle in place. That zigging here and zagging there will help her beat some particular person to a spot where their paths will cross. 

She’s walking home, the best of intentions there, too. 

She’s eased off on the things she’s supposed to be doing outside of PT. Building endurance. Keeping her lungs and damaged heart healthy. Slacked off, if she’s being honest. And apparently she’s supposed to be honest. 

She’d let if fall by the wayside as her focus narrowed to the center of her body. To ribs and cartilage and thin sheets of muscle. To thickened, ugly skin and nerve endings that scream out and burn at the slightest wrong move. She’d neglected almost everything, hell-bent on conquering one thing.

So she’s walking now. Remembering what it’s like to love this, even in the cold black of November. To love the seething, crowded streets. 

She’s walking. Trying to find the midpoint between awareness and paranoia. Between self-preservation and out-of-control fear. 

She’s walking. 

 

* * *

 

The scent hits her almost before the door swings open. Stale scotch and rank fear. Blood. The creeping fingers of panic scaling her ribs, her spine, say there’s blood, too, though there can’t be. It’s the product of her mind, but she smells it. Tastes it on her tongue. 

She sways on the threshold, battling the heavy industrial door as paper wafts to the floor. Smudged photocopies and slick brochures. Options falling away.  She slams her shoulder into the reinforced steel, damned if she’ll let it close.

She’s sinking again. Head meeting door with a sharp crack. 

Sirens, because that’s the way it always starts. The shriek of the gurney wheel. Too much sound to bear, and she can’t lift her arms to stop her ears. She can’t make her tongue work to beg them all to stop. She can’t make it stop.  

Pain. There’s pain, then, and her eyes fly wide as she feels it. It’s new and not new. There and not there as she remembers it in something more than the abstract. 

Palms slamming into her chest. An unbearable squeezing sensation in the wake of it. Paralyzing, all-consuming pain she hasn’t let herself register in months, and it’s pulling her under. 

“No.” She pushes the word out into the world through clenched teeth. 

She grips her injured wrist tight enough that the edges of the gash light up with pain. Real here and now pain. She homes in on it. She kicks to the surface, reaching up for the fire blazing from fingertips to elbow. For the and the dull insistent throb of her shoulder.

She pulls out of it. It’s not exactly a win.

Self-inflicted pain. It’s not exactly on the list of healthy options, but at least she’s past it for now. At least she’s in the door, head above dark water as she picks her way through the glass-strewn living room. Mostly above, anyway. 

Her stomach still climbs and falls, but it’s more exhaustion than a panic attack. It’s more that it really does smell foul in there, so she sets to work. A whisk broom and dustpan. Sackcloth towels, because she can’t remember if there’s a roll of paper anywhere. Hands and knees and deep breaths through her mouth. 

She sets to work, laughing a little savagely, because Burke was right about one thing, anyway: Alcohol is no temptation at all right now, and any dramatic gestures clearing the place would be a waste of energy, and that’s in short supply.

She sits back on her heels and takes the win. The glass is gone, hidden away in black plastic, and she’s half tempted to send the rest right after it.  Broom and towels. Dustpan and all, but that feels like a loss. It feels like petty defeat snatched from the jaws of small victory, so she hauls herself to her feet. She makes the trip to the trash chute. To the utility sink to rinse it all out. She takes it easy on herself, reaching up to hang the damp towels over the shower curtain rod to dry. 

She tries to take it easy on herself. 

* * *

 

The clock insists that it’s early, though November doesn’t seem to agree. She sits in the crook of the couch, half turned to the black square of night through the window. 

She tries to just sit. It’s an option she talked about with Burke. A strategy—uncurling white-knuckled fingers around ideas. Constant motion. Constant action. Fear of stillness. 

_The weight of the world . . ._

She laughs to herself about it now. Here in the crook of the couch, just sitting, she laughs to hear Castle’s voice intrude, but it wasn’t funny before. Back in the office. In that damned chair with her knees drawn up and tears coursing unchecked down her cheeks, it wasn’t funny at all. It was overwhelming. Invasive. Too much. 

It was like summer. 

Guilt swells in her chest. Self-reproach, but lashing-out anger, too. At him, mostly, but the whole cast of characters. Lanie. Javi. Her dad. There’s no room in the crowded house of her mind. For them. For anyone. For him. 

It’s _her_ problem. Her wall, her trauma, her fucked-up head and the tendrils of his influence piss her off. Right or wrong. Reasonable or unreasonable. Healthy or unhealthy, his voice in her head pisses her off a lot of the time. 

But not right now. 

Not just sitting like this. She breathes in and out. She sifts through it all. Emotion. Impulse. Reaction. She names each thing lurking, in turn, and feels a few of them slip away, leaving her lighter. Less crowded inside. She breathes in and out. 

She thinks about going to bed. Deliberately, methodically going through the night-time routine that’s long since come unraveled _._ She thinks about knitting it back up again. She’s tired enough, and who cares what the clock says anyway? Who cares if there’s a stack of things she ought to read? Acronyms she ought to decode and decisions she ought to make about prescriptions—to fill or not to fill. 

She won’t go yet, however exhausted she is. It’s an idle thought. A possibility that vanishes into the distance as soon as she thinks it. 

She reaches for the ottoman. Out and behind her from this vantage point. She forgets about the scars until they remind her. She pushes past them. A deep, slow breath in. Pain, but the kind that’s bright and liberating as she stretches her arm further. A little further, then rest. A little further still before she does the sensible thing and turns her whole damned body. Until she swings her feet to the floor and sweeps the pile of paper and card stock toward her. 

The easiest is on top. Just a name for what she’s been doing all along with Burke, and she even knew that already. She’d heard the words, at least, back when her time in the chair was one more damned thing in her way back to the case. Back to the hunt.

_Cognitive_

_Behavioral_

Those sound simple enough. They sound . . . unavoidable, though the therapy part is work, apparently. Puling them together—thought and action—it’s more work than she’s really been doing. 

 _More_  

Her eye scans down the page. It skips over things she’d rather not think about.  Capital letters like an accusation. _PTSD._ She forces her gaze back to it.  Underlines it with her thumbnail, scoring the page. Feeling the hot flare of anger. Resistance. 

She takes it in. This thing she has. This web of symptoms and triggers and scars that she’s more than. That she _can_ be more than. 

A name. It’s just a name.

She lets herself move on. Lets her finger track down the page and her mind with it. Her attention as she mentally checks off the things she’s doing already. Things she’s done tonight, with her newfound best of intentions. Things she’s been doing all the while that she needs to give herself credit for. That she needs to consider the utility of as she narrows too many options down to a strategy. 

 _Writing_  

The bullet point has been there all the while. It must have been, but for her it pops suddenly into the world. Into her side of it, anyway, and she’d almost swear she hears a tiny bell. 

_Writing_

_Aversive_

_Restructuring_

There’s more. A tangle of overwhelming verbiage, but they’re all lost to the tiny bell and the word that’s caught her eye. They’re all lost to sudden determination. Certainty that there’s good she can do here in the crook of the couch. Good without leaping tall buildings with a single bound. 

She turns the sheet over. It’s blank on the back. A pale green eight-and-a-half-by-eleven expanse and for a moment, it’s terrifying. The emptiness is terrifying, but then there’s a pen in her hand. Then it’s moving. 

Arrows along the left margin and terse fragments of sentences. Particles, really. Memories within memories within memories that she indents along the way. Squeezes in between lines. 

The heat. The petty irritation at sweat pooling in the small of her back and the weight of her hair pressed hard against her neck by the brim of her hat. Bright sun searing her eyes and sandpaper lids from long, staring nights of tears. 

Sound, then. Mostly sound, because it always starts that way. Incoherent screams. Chaos. Sirens and voices and the jounce of the ambulance. 

She jots at a furious pace, not letting herself think right now. _Cognitive._ That comes later. It _will_ come later.  Now, she snips  at the strings of linear time. The blank expanse is filling and she lets it fill, not worrying any more what came when. Not trying to make sense of memories that flow out of her into ink. 

_You'd do not die on me_

_Lanie! Get down!_

_Beckett_

_Beckett_

_Kate_

_Beckett’s down_

_Chest tube GSW stay Kate life stay lost vitals let us_

_I love you_

_I love you, Kate_

The pen stops. Her hand stops, clenching tight around the barrel. She stares down at the page. The block of text it’s devolved into as the ink races to the bottom, right-hand corner. She stares at the only words her blurring vision can make out as a tear drips on to the page and turns pale blue. 

She remembers everything. That’s true. It’s _been_ true since she laid eyes on him after. True before that, even. True before she could see it all over his face, but she’s never gotten this far. Every nightmare, every panic attack laid end to end, she’s never gotten this far through everything she remembers. 

She’s said it out loud. Dug her nails into the arms of the chair when Burke’s said it back to her. Made her hear it again. It's one of the many things she's prone to avoid. 

But she’s never gotten this far along the gnarled path of it in her own mind and now, there it is. Stark and terrifying in ink. There it is and the pen meets the page again before she can think better of it. 

_Behavior_

Fine-tipped drag and white knuckles curled around the barrel of the pen. Texture on the page in the last pale green corner, because she’s pressing hard. 

_He meant it_

_He means it_

She sets down the words. Fills in the last pale green corner and makes it more than a memory. 

_He loves you_

**Author's Note:**

> Can I ever watch Kill Shot without being compelled to barf something on to the page? Apparently not.


End file.
